When a person first sustains a spinal cord or brain injury, they are faced with many issues about how they will manage their lifestyle and daily schedule. An important part of the solution is recreation therapy, which provides leisure counseling and skills to increase a person's overall wellness in the emotional, spiritual, physical, intellectual, vocational and social aspects of life.

In this 10-minute podcast, Shepherd Center recreation therapy manager Kelly Edens, CTRS, discusses all the options available at the Center for a spinal cord or brain injury survivor. This podcast and others are available at shepherd.org/news/radio or can be downloaded as an MP3 file from the link above. A transcript of the interview is also available on the Shepherd Center Radio web page.

Mrs. Edens is the manager of Shepherd Center's Recreation Therapy Program, a position she has held since 2008. She joined the Shepherd Center staff in 2000 and has worked in various positions within the Recreation Therapy Program. She is married to Matt Edens, Shepherd Center's sports teams coordinator, and they have two daughters.

For more information about recreation therapy opportunities at Shepherd Center, click here.

Recreation therapy is a donor-funded program at Shepherd Center. You may give online by clicking here. Also, volunteers raise money through the hospital's annual Derby Day event, which is held on the first Saturday of May in conjunction with the Kentucky Derby. For information about the event, click here.

About Shepherd Center

Shepherd Center, located in Atlanta, Georgia, is a private, not-for-profit hospital specializing in medical treatment, research and rehabilitation for people with spinal cord injury, brain injury, multiple sclerosis, spine and chronic pain, and other neuromuscular conditions. Founded in 1975, Shepherd Center is ranked by U.S. News & World Report among the top 10 rehabilitation hospitals in the nation. In its more than four decades, Shepherd Center has grown from a six-bed rehabilitation unit to a world-renowned, 152-bed hospital that treats more than 935 inpatients, 541 day program patients and more than 7,300 outpatients each year.